Building links will cost a lot of time and there are risks that nothing might happen, but the rewards are often worth it

Hannah Smith

Go to fiverr and type “links” – but you don’t want these type of links and its not sustainable

Use Zemanta, pay for impressions, get the visibility you would get if you we’re someone like Rand Fishkin

Ask for a reference link in the description of photos in Flickr

Image Raider, find out who’s using your images, just enter your URL

PR agencies good at getting publicity but not links. Ask for an image credit if used of on a news site or blog, seems to get better returns as owners understand more

Sometimes paying for advertising (no-follow only) opens doors to forum and community owners that might lead to SEO value in the future

Become a regular contributor on blogs, build relationships

Ian Lurie

When looking for bad links title tags are a good place to start, misspelling and auto generated ones will stand out, could be a problem

If you view he source code on Google’s page “How Search Works” you can scrape code that allows you to find thousands of examples of actual spam, spam that Google see’s as spam – this can be used when reviewing your own profile

I must apologise that I didn’t add more insights but I stupidly brought an iPad to the conference and live blogging on that tablet is near impossible!

As the majority of the SEO community now knows and too the now presumably unemployed agency/in-house team of Interflora – advertorials and link networks will cause you great problems in organic search. If you want to read the two best articles on why Interflora lost rankings for a number of high value keywords (including their brand terms) then these pieces by Martin Macdonald and Chris C Cemper are the best around – and both right in my opinion.

What I found more interesting was Aaron Wall’s blog post on how Google themselves had done the same, promoting some of the core services and products like Adwords, Analytics and the Chromebook. One can only presume that the internal marketing department for those areas are NOT familiar with their own webmaster guidelines – which really actually doesn’t surprise me, given the size of the business.

Anyway – I managed to spot another national UK Newspaper with an advertorial – the Mirror seemingly putting 4 do follow links with exact match anchor text pointing to “MoneyVista”. (view the page here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/personal-finance/cheap-insurance-compare-comparison-sites-1705747)

I would hope that the guys over at the Mirror are now formatting the links in this article with the correct no-follow and start implementing a checklist for the guys that upload the content to avoid reductions in PageRank.

Moving on to the broader subject we all know paid links are bad but what’s not been discussed in specific detail before are the parts of the subject that constitute “grey areas” – of which there are many.

Advertorials are often done by the biggest brands in the world by people that don’t even realise what SEO is – they look for consumer reach and PR pickup. While it’s completely the responsibility of the buyer and seller to know the correct technical setup such as the “no follow” – these are often missed

Product reviews – what’ to stop someone like Apple giving away 10,000 Mac Book Pro’s to the top most authoritative bloggers? Nothing. I’d be willing to bet that at least 30% would write about Apple and most likely link to them too

Blogroll Links – a lot of bloggers still genuinely like to link to their friends, colleagues and respected similar websites but with the risk of penalties I’m sure many now avoid this

Web Designer Links – many agencies and web designer like to mark their work with “Produced by” or “Designed by” at the bottom of websites. This usually happens to businesses that are small or medium sized as they don’t usually know the implications of leaving it there

Partner Links – for larger businesses there are often company partnerships, these often result in crossover linking, either on a stand alone page or in the footer of a website. Sometimes this is a business requirement and useful to consumers – but would search engines know this?

Guest Blog Posts – at the moment this is OK to do but only if you have a genuine reason to write something of value. Small or duplicated guest blog posts are NOT acceptable but many still fear their good ones could put them at risk.

I’m sure most of these links above will become outlawed if they’re not already – or simply just no-follow all links to remove risk.

So it seems that Google is currently in the process of updating how Google+ brand/business pages are being displayed in the SERPS.

Besides the new thumbnails showing the old brand logos has reduced in size and the business description now removed. At the moment (9am GMT) the thumbnails are not showing fully in the UK but they are on google.com – most likely because it’s rolling out now.

What else is interesting is that Google now seems to be cutting off posts after 24 hours, probably in a bid to keep results fresh:

You can see that in the UK for a number of brands that do actually have quite a good presence on Google+ they now do NOT trigger their listing in the search results:

Toyota has over 200k +1’s and over 2 million followers

Burberry has over 2 million +1’s and 2 million followers

If anyone else has any more information on this update please let me know.